As concerns for care of patients and residents of facilities such as hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living and community living centers increases, it is becoming more and more important to have a safe and simple method for monitoring the location of each individual in the facility. These types of facilities have a need to know the location and movement of occupants both for safety and health care reasons. Among safety concerns is the need to identity occupants who have wandered into restricted or unsafe areas in or even outside the facility. This need is complicated by the fact that different occupants may often have different access opportunities and restrictions.
In an emergency, such as a fire, there is obviously a vital need to locate all occupants who have not evacuated the facility and remain inside. Such failures to leave occur due to poor hearing, poor mobility, or cognitive impairment in elderly occupants.
On the heath care side, a location system would provide valuable information about a patient, including lack of activity over a period of time. It would also be a benefit to monitor a person's activity over a period of time, as well as identifying which locations in the facility his or her activity occurred. Care also would benefit from knowing the locations of care facility nursing staff. For billing and liability reasons, it would be useful to the facility administrator to know if a nurse or aide indeed was with a patient in a particular location at a particular time. It would also be helpful if physical assets such as, for example, critical equipment like defibrillators were tracked and displayed and thus located by persons attempting to respond to a situation.
Up to now, this information has not been available in a manner which would allow care providers or other facility operators to visualize the location information and quickly understand its meaning.
It would be of great advantage in the art if system and method could be provided that gave a visualization of each person within a facility.
Another advantage would be if a system and method could use infrared and radio frequency sensing technologies to provide data for visualization of individuals associated with the sensors.
Still another advantage would be if the system and method permitted visualization in two dimension on a monitor screen and would also permit visualization in three dimensions on the screen, as needed.
It would be yet another advance if individual areas such as specific floors in a facility could be selectively monitored by a care provider or other location operators.
Other advantages will appear hereinafter.